Until the late 1970s, US prison inmates were treated as human guinea pigs, subjected to shocking medical experiments. And even today, nearly three decades after the federal government stepped in to protect the rights of human research subjects, convicted criminals remain at risk of abuse, according to an expert panel convened by the US Institute of Medicine (IOM).
The panel describes research involving prisoners as a 鈥渕urky area鈥�, poorly documented and with limited ethical oversight. 鈥淲e are very concerned, because we know there is a significant history of abuse,鈥� says panel chairman Lawrence Gostin, a specialist in public-health law at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Among the worst historical excesses were experiments conducted on prisoners until 1974 at Holmesburg Prison near Philadelphia, in which inmates suffered skin rashes during tests of substances that included chemical weapons.
Today, most experiments on prisoners are behavioural or sociological. Even so, the IOM panel wants all research involving jail inmates, and the larger number of people on parole or probation, to be brought under a national system of ethical oversight. Simply relying on informed consent among a population whose autonomy is severely curtailed is not sufficient, Gostin says.
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The panel also calls for the US government to establish a database to track all studies involving convicted criminals, as it was even unable to determine how many experiments involving prisoners are under way.